MEMBERSHIP AND CODES

floremolla

2

reviews

11

helpful votes

2

ratings

Underworld

By:
Don DeLillo

Narrated by:
Richard Poe

Length: 31 hrs and 27 mins

Unabridged

Overall

4 out of 5 stars
94

Performance

4.5 out of 5 stars
75

Story

4 out of 5 stars
77

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

5 out of 5 stars

A modern classic - read it

Riveting audio experience!

Overall

5 out of 5 stars

Performance

5 out of 5 stars

Story

5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 11-07-17

First class performance from Richard Poe. His deep steady voice, with its myriad of subtle shifts of accent and character made this audiobook head and shoulders the best I've heard in several years of Audible membership.Helped of course by the high quality of the novel itself - an elegy for America in the second half of of the twentieth century, despite the seedy, sordid glimpses of its underbelly.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

One Hundred Years of Solitude

By:
Gabriel García Márquez,
Gregory Rabassa - translator

Narrated by:
John Lee

Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins

Unabridged

Overall

4 out of 5 stars
364

Performance

4 out of 5 stars
330

Story

4 out of 5 stars
330

One of the 20th century's enduring works,
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

Awful reader, especially of women.

disappointed with this narration

Overall

3 out of 5 stars

Performance

2 out of 5 stars

Story

4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 16-06-17

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I wouldn't recommend this recording. I found the narration mechanical, devoid of feeling and curiously delivered. The narrator had a very limited range of voices, just a breathy high voice for females and a breathy lower voice for males. I don't know enough Spanish to have an opinion on his pronunciation but several English words were pronounced wrongly - impious was 'impeeous', primer was 'primmer', and vehement was 'vyhement'. It was all very distracting.

What other book might you compare One Hundred Years of Solitude to, and why?

I'd compare it to other books featuring magic realism - Love in the Time of Cholera by the same author and The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende.

Would you be willing to try another one of John Lee’s performances?

Probably not.

Could you see One Hundred Years of Solitude being made into a movie or a TV series? Who would the stars be?

Unlikely. The book was published fifty years ago and would have been filmed by now if it had been suitable for film adaptation. The seven generations of characters with similar names would have been difficult enough to portray but also to reflect the history of Colombia and incorporate magic realism to good effect would have been well nigh impossible. Though if it had, Meryl Streep would no doubt have won an Oscar for her portrayal of the hundred year old Ursula.

Any additional comments?

Notwithstanding the quality of the narration, I'm glad I listened to this novel on audio. I think I'd have found it hard going to read with its plethora of characters, its obscure (to me) historical references and the magic realism (I'm not a fan) but it's one of the most important Latin American books of the twentieth century and worth the effort.